Anam Cara

When you love someone who is very hurt, one of the worst things you can do is to directly address the hurt and make an issue out of it. A strange dynamic comes alive in the soul if you make something into an issue. It becomes a habit and keeps recurring in a pattern. Frequently, it is better simply to acknowledge that there is a wound there, but then stay away from it. Every chance you get, shine the gentle light of the soul in on the wound. It is helpful to remember that there are ancient resources of renewal and refreshment in the circle of love that bring and hold you both together. The destiny of your love is never dependent merely on the fragile resources of your separate subjectivities. You can invoke the healing of the third force of light between you; this can bring forgiveness, consolation, and healing in stony times.

When you love someone, it is destructive to keep scraping at the clay of your belonging. There is much to recommend not interfering with your love. Two people who love each other should never feel called to explain to an outside party why they love each other, or why it is that they belong together. The place that they belong is a secret place. Their souls know why they are together; and they should trust that togetherness. If you keep interfering with your connection with your Other, your lover, your anam ara, you gradually begin to force a distance between you. There is this wonderful two-line poem from Thom Gunn called “Jamesian.” Henry James is the most precise and utterly nuanced of novelists. He described things in such fine detail and from so many different angles. But such insidious analysis can become obsessive and destructive of the lyrical presence of love.

JAMESIAN

Their relationship consisted

in discussing if it existed.

If you keep shining the neon light of analysis and accountability on the tender tissue of your belonging, you make it parched and barren.

A person should always offer a prayer of graciousness for the love that has awakened in them. When you feel love for your beloved and the beloved’s love for you, now and again you should offer the warmth of your love as a blessing for those who are damaged and unloved. Send that love out into the world to people who are desperate, to those who are starving, to those who are trapped in prison, in hospitals, and into all the brutal terrains of bleak and tormented lives. When you send that love out from the bountifulness of your own love, it reaches other people. This love is the deepest power of prayer.

IN THE KINGDOM OF LOVE, THERE IS NO COMPETITION

Prayer is the act and presence of sending this light from the bountifulness of your love to other people to heal, free, and bless them. When there is love in your life, you should share it spiritually with those who are pushed to the very edge of life. There is a lovely idea in the Celtic tradition that if you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times. In the kingdom of love there is no competition; there is no possessiveness or control. The more love you give away, the more love you will have. One remembers here Dante’s notion that the secret rhythm of the universe is the rhythm of love, which moves the stars and the planets. Love is the source, center, and destiny of experience.

A Friendship Blessing

May you be blessed with good friends.

May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.

May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.

May this change you.

May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you.

May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging.

May you treasure your friends.

May you be good to them and may you be there for them; may they bring you all the blessings, challenges, truth, and light that you need for your journey.

May you never be isolated.

May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your anam ara.

TWOTOWARD A SPIRITUALITY OF THE SENSES

THE FACE IS THE ICON OF CREATION